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I love the '50s and grew up loving works from that time period and from those great playwrights.

This might be one way to start talking about differences between the early postmodern writers of the fifties and sixties and their contemporary descendants.

Then I found books that were written much later, as late as 15 years ago. It was very superficial material, but enough to tell me that the genesis of this story was worth exploring.

I belong to the middle class that grew up very influenced by the Catholic church. The people of the novel are from a more pagan and practical world in which the Christianity is just a veneer.

I still believe nonfiction is the most important literature to come out of the second half of the 20th century.

The modern form of things had begun to appeal to me, also (as material for satire) politics, and the lives of the great and little, high up in the social scale.

I chose a time in the century which had the greatest moments for novels - the late '30s and World War II.

In ages past, there was less of a dichotomy between good literature and fun reads. In the twentieth century, I think, it split apart, so that you had serious fiction and genre fiction.

In my thirties I found myself, to use a colloquial fiction, in a suburban house at the foothills of the Dublin mountains. Married and with two little daughters, I led a life which would have been recognizable to any woman who had led it and to many others who had not.

The world loves the 1950s.